On her show Full Frontal, Samantha Bee talks with a diverse group of supporters of Donald Trump as to why they support him despite his xenophobia, racism, and advocacy of violence.
I have got to hand it to Bee. Listening to the rationalizations of this group would have driven me up the wall and I would have started yelling. But she manages to keep it all together. That’s professionalism.
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An hour or so ago, I voted for Bernie Sanders in the Ohio Democratic primary. I went to my usual polling place near my home and there was no line at all though people were there voting. It is hard for me to compare the turnout based on my own experience since normally I voted early in the day before going to work. This time, taking advantage of my retired status, I went in the middle of the day.
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The tale of Marco Rubio is in some ways a sad but familiar one of a man whose vaulting ambition leads him to try and grab the crown before it is his time and fails. We have the spectacle of a young man, gifted with good looks, fluency of speech, and the ability to win elections at the state and local level, who then decides that he could become president even before he has built up a record of concrete achievements. In order to do that he takes careful stock of whose support he needs and carefully cultivates everyone who can help him on his way, such as the party establishment and big money backers.
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Pretty much everyone knows that Hillary Clinton put her foot in it when she praised Nancy Reagan after her death, listing as one of her accomplishments that she helped start a national conversation over AIDS. This created a serious backlash by those well aware that the Reagans, while in the White House, not only did not do anything about it until his final year in office, but that White House press briefings, when responding to questions about the issue, became chuckle-fests with innuendo and snide references to the ‘gay plague’.
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Tomorrow is the day that Ohio holds its primary election. Needless to say, I will be voting for Bernie Sanders and hope he does well. The ACLU of Ohio has put out a three-step guide to voting.
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As she frets that Bernie Sanders has much greater success in appealing to younger voters than she has, Saturday Night Live reveals that Clinton has put out a new ad that tries to get them to like her.
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Predicting the results of American politics was once quite simple: The candidate with the most money won almost all the time. The logic behind that was that running a political campaign, especially at the congressional and presidential level, cost a lot of money because of ad buys, consultants, staff, and the like and only those who could depend upon big money backers were the ones who could afford to do so. It was only if you had big money backing that the media treated you as a credible candidate and gave you respectful coverage while those who did not have money were ignored and marginalized or even ridiculed.
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Watching these young children talk politics with Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show makes me wonder why being accused of being ‘childish’ is viewed as an insult. Quite a remarkable group.
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Last night’s 12th Republican debate was decidedly different in tone from the previous ones, even if the actual content consisted of the same right-wing extremist positions we have heard before. There were no insults and name calling, no interrupting and talking over each other, and no repeated requests to the moderators to be called upon to rebut someone else. The moderators tried a couple of times early on on to get the others to respond to Donald Trump’s statements but they did not take the bait.
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